Deborah Paredez
Deborah Paredez (born December 19, 1970) is a Hispanic American poet and academic. Life Paredez was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Her family had migrated there in the 1730s when it was still a part of Mexico under the Spanish Empire.Interview: Deborah Paredez, Austin Poets Directory, December 2, 2011. Web, June 6, 2012. http://www.chicanopedia.org/article.php?articleid=20&categoryid=46&subid, Chicanopedia Article. Retrieved June 6, 2012. Paredez’s education was largely “informal and self-taught”. She earned a B.A. in English literature from Trinity University in 1993, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Dance from Northwestern University in 2002. She taught at Vassar College from 2000-2003. She lived in Seattle, Washington, Chicago, Illinois, Oaxaca City, Mexico, and New York City before moving back to Texas. Paredez is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin with the Department of Theatre and Dance and the Department of English, where many of her courses focus on race and performance, and she is also affiliated with the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies.http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/caaas/faculty/dap398, University of Texas Center for African & African American Studies page. Retrieved June 6, 2012. She served as the Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for the 2009-2010 school year and the Interim Director for 2011–2012, and she also serves as the Director of Arts and Community Engagement.http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/cmas/faculty/dap398, University of Texas Center for Mexican American Studies. Retrieved June 6, 2012. Her poetry and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Latino Studies Journal, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Paredez is also a co-founder and co-director of CantoMundo, an organization dedicated to Latina/o poets and poetry. CantoMundo is a collective of Latina/o poets who work to “1. nurture and enhance their poetics; 2. lecture and learn about aspects of Latina/o poetics currently not being discussed by the mainstream poetry publishers and critics; and 3. network with peer poets to enrich and further disseminate Latina/o poetry.”http://www.cantomundo.org/about/, CantoMundo website. The organization states on their website that “While CantoMundo envisions developing workshops specifically devoted to the craft of poetry, every aspect of the work, including discussions around aesthetic issues, will be firmly rooted in social concerns. This open acknowledgment of larger concerns honors the sociopolitical underpinnings of Latina/o poetry.”http://www.cantomundo.org/about/, CantoMundo website. Writing ''Selenidad'' According to Paredez, Selenidad is not about Selena but about her afterlife. It's about the collective mourning of her fans. the way she is remembered, the representations and symbols that are still remembered today. Concepts related to Selenidad: Transculturation Transculturation as Fernando Ortiz coined, is the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. Transculturation occurs as a 3-stage process acquisition of new cultural material from foreign culture. Transculturation appears in aspects of society where 2 or more cultures interact such as in wars, ethnic conflict, racism, multiculturalism, cross-culturalism and interracial marriage. A historical example would be the period of colonization in Latin America. Diana Taylor describes transculturation as a new form, which denotes the transformative process undergone by all societies as they come in contact with and acquire foreign cultural material, whether willingly or unwillingly.Taylor, see bibliography. Angel Rama utilizes transculturation to think beyond dualism and dichotomies.Rama, see bibliography. Transculturation can be seen in the book by observing what Selena represents to fans even after her death. In her life, music and performance Selena included her personal life style as a Tejana, and American cultural practices. At the same time Selena’s music and performance utilized Mexican culture and Latino culture; through Spanish language and Latin dance moves. In Chapter 1, in Selenidad, Paredez utilized Selena last concert to highlight the way Selena would go back an forth in her performance from American music to Latin music. The specific music is the “disco medley” where Selena sings and dances to music of the disco era and her Spanish songs such as “Como La Flor.”Paredez, see bibliography. The mergence of all these cultural references contribute to the phenomenon Selena became after her death. Many people around the world were able to identify with parts of Selena’s life and music. Latinidad Latinidad is described in a sense as a collective Latina/o identity. Felix Padilla introduced the term Latinidad. Latinidad is based on the study of collective identity in Spanish-speaking countries of Central America, the Caribbean and South America.Miguel, see bibliography. Arlene Davila describes this notion of Latinidad as the “out-of-many, one-people' process through which 'Latinos' or 'Hispanics' are conceived and represented as sharing one common identity.”Morrison, see bibliography. Latinidad is also part of pan-Latina/o solitary. In the introduction and Chapter 4, "Becoming Selena, becoming Latina," Paredez explains the collective memory of Selena as a Latina among Latinos in the United States as well as in Latin America.Paredez, see bibliography. Among Latinos there was a collective grief of the dead of Selena that remains after the many years that have passed. Selena is also used as the representation of what a Latina should look like. Girls, teens, women, and queers all over Latin America as well as United States haven imitated her look as well as her dance moves. Poetry Paredez is also a poet.http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/caaas/faculty/dap398, University of Texas Center for African & African American Studies page. Retrieved June 6, 2012. In 2002, she published her debut book of poems entitled This Side of Skin (2002). Some of the works in this collection were included in other publications including Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A collection of U.S. Latina fiction and poetry (1995), This Promiscuous Light (1996), Floricanto Sí! A collection of Latina poetry (1998), The Wind Shifts: New Latino poetry (2007), and literary magazine Mandorla: Writing from the Americas (2011).http://www.chicanopedia.org/article.php?articleid=20&categoryid=46&subid, Chicanopedia article. Paredez is working on a second volume of poetry, which will be called After the Light. Recognition *At the University of Texas at Austin, Paredez was honored as a Katherine Ross Richards Centennial Teaching Fellow in English and Fellow of C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair in United States-Mexico Relations. *In 2002, she was awarded the Writing Award of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation (a foundation created by the well-known Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros to honor her father). *Paredez received the 2008-2009 American Association of University Women (AAUW) Postdoctoral Fellowship *''Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the performance of memory'' won honorable mentions from the 2010 Latina/o Studies Book Award and the 2011 National Association of Chicana/o Studies.Deborah Paredez, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University. Web, Sep. 26, 2018. Publications Poetry *''This Side of Skin''. San Antonio, TX: Wings Press, 2002. Non-fiction * Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the performance of memory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Deborah Paredez, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Nov. 7, 2015. See also *List of Chicano poets *List of U.S. poets References *Miguel, Guadalupe San. "Embracing Latinidad: Beyond Nationalism in the History of Education." Journal of Latinos & Education 10.1 (2011): 3-22. *Morrison, Amanda Maria. "Chicanas and “Chick Lit”: Contested Latinidad in the Novels of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez." Journal of Popular Culture 43.2 (2010): 309-329. *Rama, Angel. Transculturación Narrativa En América Latina. México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982. Print. Notes External links ;Poems *"The Fire" *Deborah Paredez at the Poetry Foundation *Poetry ;Prose *Deborah Paredez in the Los Angeles Review of Books ;Audio / video *Deborah Paredez at YouTube ;Books *Deborah Paredez at Amazon.com ;About *Deborah Paredez at University of Texas at Austin *Interview: Deborah Paredez, Austin Poets Directory, 2011 *Deborah Paredez Official website Category:1970 births Category:Living people Category:Northwestern University alumni Category:University of Texas at Austin faculty Category:Vassar College faculty Category:American poets Category:American educators Category:People from San Antonio, Texas Category:21st-century poets Category:21st-century women writers Category:American women writers Category:Poets Category:Women poets Category:English-language poets Category:American academics Category:Chicana poets Category:Hispanic and Latino American poets